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By: Dr. Elizabeth Craig | September 15, 2014

Being able to complete a crown procedure all the way to permanent cementation is the greatest addition to dentistry in my career. I am very excited to be able to offer this to my patients. Let me briefly walk you through how getting a crown USED to go and then I am going to show you how technology expedites and vastly improves both the process AND the outcome!

Let’s say you broke your molar and you now need a crown… you’d make an appointment and I would numb your tooth and prepare the tooth for a crown. Then I’d need an impression of your tooth to send to the lab so they could make the crown. I would have to express this goopy stuff that had to sit in your mouth for 5 minutes until it got hard. Frequently this goo made patients gag and it took several attempts to get a good enough impression. Then I’d make a temporary crown and off you’d go for 2 weeks while I shipped the impression to the lab and waited for them to return it. During this time frequently the temporary crown would fall off causing discomfort and cause an extra trip for me to put it back on. (Not good for either of us!) Sometimes, when the crown returned from the lab it didn’t fit properly and we had to start the whole process again. Ugh!

Now for the same cost, we can eliminate the second appointment and the goopy impression part of the appointment! We still numb the tooth and prepare it for the crown, but next we digitally scan your mouth and design the crown right there in the room with you!

If there are any questions we are able to refer back to the actual tooth instead of a model that may have been distorted in the shipping process. After the crown is designed, we mill it out of a solid block. There are several different choices of materials to use based on esthetics and strength requirements of the tooth that is being crowned.

Once we have the crown milled in this purple/softer state, we try it in. This is the time we can make adjustments before glazing it. If it doesn’t fit or look right, we can just make a new one in 10 minutes! Once we have it looking perfect in the mouth we put it in the glazing machine.

When it comes out it is ready for cementation and away you go! This is the same cost and material as when I used to order it from a lab with no extra appointments!!